Every chess database begins with the same question: how do we store a game? PGN is the default answer — human-readable, portable, and surprisingly wasteful. A walkthrough of moving toward binary coordinates and legal-move indexing, and the engineering trade-off between the smallest format and the fastest one.

How I built a CLI tool to merge chess PGN files using F#'s type system, streaming I/O, and functional patterns — merging gigabytes of games with 64 KB of memory.

My experience at the Karen Asrian Memorial chess tournament in Armenia—games, culture, and lessons learned.